form follows function (and why that’s beautiful)
“Form follows function” means more than just minimalist design for people to gawk at. The phrase actually predates Bauhaus. American architect Louis Sullivan coined it back in 1896, writing about skyscrapers, but it was the Bauhaus school that turned it into a whole philosophy. Everything from a teapot to a building should be designed the same way: strip it down, understand what it’s for, and let that purpose shape the object. The school only lasted fourteen years before the Nazis shut it down in 1933, but its people scattered across the world and basically wrote the DNA of modern design.
To me the phrase represents the idea that good design is something tangible, something where everything has a purpose. And that’s where the admiration comes from. Art for art’s sake is cool, no need for a means to an end there. But true appreciation comes when you understand there’s purpose behind every decision made, optimized for its use case, and because of that it’s beautiful.
Here are some of my favorite Bauhaus-inspired pieces.
teenage engineering sp-1
An unreleased prototype of Kanye West’s Stem Player. Quick backstory: when Kanye wanted a device that could split songs into stems (vocals, drums, bass, instrumental) and let you remix them live, Teenage Engineering, the Stockholm company behind the OP-1, designed the SP-1. A limited run of prototypes was produced, but the project got shelved and the Stem Player that actually shipped in 2021 was built by a different company, Kano Computing. So the SP-1 exists in this weird limbo: a finished design that never became a product, now kept alive by a small community writing their own firmware for it.
For years the SP-1 was basically a beautiful brick. It shipped locked to Kanye’s own music, so even if you managed to get your hands on one of the prototypes, you were stuck listening to whatever stems were already loaded on it. That changed recently thanks to the community. Since Teenage Engineering never released the device or any documentation, a group of engineers reverse-engineered it and open sourced their work, publishing developer docs and a stem loader that lets you upload your own songs, split into stems, without even opening up the device or touching the original firmware. It’s a fitting second life: a piece of pure functional design, finally allowed to actually function for everyone.
lamy 2000
Designed in 1966 by Gerd A. Müller, who fittingly came from Braun’s design department before joining Lamy, the 2000 was the first pen made from Makrolon, a fiberglass-reinforced polycarbonate developed by Bayer. That material is what makes it special: it’s light like plastic but with a warm, brushed, almost fabric-like texture that wears in rather than wearing out, and it blends seamlessly into the brushed stainless steel of the grip so the whole pen reads as one continuous form.
It also has an ink window, a subtle translucent slit in the body so you can see how much ink is left without unscrewing anything. It stands out from other fountain pens precisely because it refuses to look like one. No gold trim, no ornate clip, the nib is even partially hooded. Lamy has kept it in production basically unchanged for almost sixty years, which tells you everything: when the design is purely driven by function, there’s nothing to go out of style.
braun series 8
Clean lines, simple, useful, and still admirable for more than just its function. Braun is really the company that carried the Bauhaus torch into the postwar consumer world. In the 1950s they partnered with the Ulm School of Design (the informal successor to the Bauhaus) and hired Dieter Rams, whose motto “less, but better” and Ten Principles of Good Design became the modern gospel of the philosophy. Rams’s principle that good design is “as little design as possible” is basically form-follows-function restated for the electric shaver era.
The Series 8 is a direct descendant of that lineage. There’s nothing on it that doesn’t need to be there. It doesn’t beg for your attention on the shelf. It just quietly does its job, and the longer you use it the more you notice how every curve and surface was a decision. Which is the whole point of this post, really. The beauty isn’t in spite of the function. It is the function.